Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 151
when small, comparatively weak states alone permitted them free pur
suit of the gains of the market. The advantage to kings and ministers of
permitting a vigorous capitalist class to pursue private gain wherever a
prospective profit could be discovered became equally obvious in the
eighteenth century, for their activities began to swell total tax receipts
and made the maintenance of standing armies and navies, which had
been financially difficult in the seventeenth century, relatively easy.^6
Cooperation between rulers and capitalists at home was matched by
cooperation overseas. Indeed, the capacity to protect themselves and
their goods at comparatively low cost was the central secret of Euro
pean commercial expansion in the eighteenth century. It arose partly
from the technical superiority of European ships and forts combined
with the abundance and comparative cheapness of iron cannon. An
equally critical element in European merchants’ lower protection costs
was the superior organization and discipline which European-trained
troops, officers, and administrators commonly exhibited, even when
stationed half the globe away from the seat of sovereignty and source
of instruction, pay, and promotion upon which their obedience ulti
mately depended.
Many factors entered into this phenomenon, among them the psy
chological effect of repeated drill that made soldiers into obedient,
replaceable parts of a military machine. However ill-supplied or
poorly disciplined European troops stationed overseas may have
seemed to an officer newly arrived from European parade grounds,
their superiority over Asian, African, or Amerindian armed forces
became apparent whenever local collisions occurred. In India, for
example, when struggle for dominion over that vast land broke out
between French and English military entrepreneurs, ridiculously small
European contingents regularly played decisive roles, less because of
their weaponry than because of their dependable obedience on the
battlefield and their maneuverability in the face of an enemy.^7
- The Royal Navy, for example, was chronically short of funds in Samuel Pepys’
time, whereas by the early decades of the eighteenth century, the financial expedi
ents—postponement of payment and laying up of ships for part of the year which had
been common practice in the late seventeenth century—ceased to be necessary. Cf.
Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965),
p. 496 and passim; Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the
Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), p. 66. For parallel improvement in
the punctuality of French army pay and tightening of financial administration in the
eighteenth century see A. Corvisier, L'armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère
de Choiseul: le Soldat (Paris, 1964), 2:822–24; Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the
Seven Years War (Durham, N.C., 1967), p. 95.
- Cf. James P. Lawford, Britain's Army in India, from its Origins to the Conquest of
Bengal (London, 1978). At the Battle of Plassey ( 1757) Robert Clive commanded 784
